Group Lending

Group lending is for institutions that lend to groups — a village bank, a women's savings group, a trading association. Members belong to a group, the group meets on a set day, and staff lend to the group (or to several of its members at once) and collect repayments together at the meeting.

Group lending is included in the free trial and in the Corporate and Enterprise plans; on Pro, opening Groups shows an upgrade prompt instead. There is nothing to switch on: open Groups in the menu. If your plan changes, nothing you recorded is lost — it comes back as soon as the plan includes group lending again. It works on its own — it is not part of the SACCO add-on, and neither needs the other.

The Groups menu

Groups opens a hub with everything in one place:

• All groups — the list of your branch's groups.
• Group loans — every loan made to a group or to its members, and the button to make another.
• Collect repayments — record what a group paid at its meeting.
• Meeting history — the meetings held so far.
• Membership fees — the joining fees and subscriptions your groups charge (see below).
• Reports — Group performance, Group collection sheet and Exposure by group.

Above the cards, Meeting today lists the groups whose meeting day is today, each with a button to open it or start collecting.

Creating a group

Go to Groups → All groups → NEW GROUP. A group needs only a name. You can also set:

• Group number — left blank, it is numbered automatically (G-001, G-002, …). It is a label, not an identifier.
• Meeting day, frequency, time and place.
• Max members — a limit on how many members can be added. Blank means no limit.
• Joint liability — whether members stand behind each other's loans. It is recorded on the group's loans and shown in the group's arrears view.
• Loan officer — the team member who runs the group (administrators and branch managers choose; a loan officer's own groups are assigned to them automatically).
• Contact phone and email — used for the group's own borrowing record (see below). Left blank, the chairperson's are used.

A loan officer sees the groups assigned to them. A group nobody is assigned to is visible to everyone except loan officers. Every other role sees all of the branch's groups.

Members

Open a group and go to its Members tab.

• ADD EXISTING MEMBERS — pick borrowers of this branch who are not in a group yet.
• ADD NEW MEMBER — creates a new borrower already in this group. The new borrower is ticked Group-only by default (see below); you can untick it.
• REMOVE and MOVE — take ticked members out of the group, or move them to another active group.

You can also put a borrower in a group when you create them (the Lending Group part of the New Borrower form), or change it later from the borrower's own page (the Group detail, with a Change link). The Borrowers list has a Group column and filters for borrower type and group.

A borrower can be in one group at a time. Two people changing the same member at once is detected: the second change is refused with a message to refresh.

Group-only members

A group-only member borrows only through their group. They do not get a New loan button, and they are not offered in the Create Loan picker — the group's page lends to them instead. Their customer portal login cannot apply for a loan either.

Only an administrator or branch manager can change a member between group-only and individual (the link on the members table). A group-only member cannot be removed from a group until they have been changed to individual; they can be moved from one group to another.

Removing and moving members

Removing or moving a member is refused while they have an open loan or draft in the group. An administrator or branch manager can lift that block after a confirmation. A member who held a leadership role loses it when they leave.

Membership fees

A membership fee is money a member pays to belong to a group: a joining fee, an annual subscription, weekly dues. You set the fees up once for the branch, then choose them for each member.

Creating fees. Go to Groups → Membership fees → NEW FEE (administrators and branch managers). A fee has a name, an amount and how often it is charged:

• One-off — charged once, on the first day.
• Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly or Annual — charged on the first day and again every week, month, three months or year after it. A monthly fee that starts on the 31st is charged on the last day of the shorter months.

A fee can be switched off (Status → Inactive). A switched-off fee cannot be chosen for new members, and members who already have it keep it. Changing a fee's amount or how often only affects members charged from then on: each member keeps the terms they were charged at. Fees belong to the branch you are working in.

Choosing fees for a member. When you add members (ADD EXISTING BORROWERS or CREATE NEW MEMBER), a Membership fees list appears under the member details. Tick the fees they pay. They are charged from today; an administrator or branch manager can choose another first day. Later, open the group's Members tab and click the Membership fees entry beside a member to see what they are charged, what they have paid and what they owe, and to ADD FEE or End fee.

What is owed is worked out from the fee and the payments received — nothing runs overnight. The member's entry reads, for instance, UGX 6,000 owed (1 overdue) or Paid up. A fee is Due on the day it falls and Overdue after it. Payments are applied to the oldest charge first; paying more than is owed is kept as credit against the next charges.

Taking a payment. In the member's fees, click Record payment, check the amount, choose the account it was paid into and press RECORD PAYMENT. It is recorded as Other income of the type Membership Fees in that account, so it shows in the account's ledger, the profit and loss and the general ledger. If the connection fails part-way the form says so; pressing the button again finishes the job without taking the money twice. The branch's day lock applies: a payment is dated the open day. To take a payment back, use Reverse last payment (administrators and branch managers) — the income is marked reversed. A fee payment cannot be edited or deleted from the Other Income page or the account ledger, because it is counted against the member.

Leaders

On the Details tab, choose the chairperson, vice chairperson, secretary and treasurer from the group's active members. One member cannot hold two roles. The chairperson's phone and email stand in for the group's contact when none is set.

The group's borrowing record

Each group has its own entry on the Borrowers list, marked Group. That is the borrower a loan to the whole group is made to, so the schedule, payments, receipts and reminders work for it like any loan. It is kept in step automatically: it takes the group's name, contact and status. If it is ever missing, Check / Repair on the group's Details tab recreates it. It cannot be deleted from the Borrowers list.

Lending to a group

Open the group's Loans tab (or Group loans) and press NEW GROUP LOAN. Choose:

• A loan for each member — tick the members and set each amount; each gets their own loan, repaid by them, tagged to the group.
• One loan to the group — the group borrows as one: a single loan, repaid at the meeting. You may note each member's share for information; if the shares do not add up to the loan, you get a warning but it is still allowed.

Both start from a loan product, so its rate, term, repayment schedule and fees apply. Pick the product, the start date and (for the officer) who the loans are under.

These create drafts. Approval, editing and disbursement happen on each loan as for any other, from Loan Drafts. A member who already has an open loan or draft in this group is skipped, and a member whose status is not active is skipped, with the reason shown.

If the connection drops part-way, the batch can be resumed: reopen the slider and choose Resume, or press Retry failed. Loans already created are never created twice.

The group's page shows its figures — active loans, outstanding, arrears and PAR 30 — taken from the same calculations as the reports.

Seeing a group's loans

Groups → Group loans (also Loans → Group Loans in the menu) shows every group loan in the same grid as the Loans page, with a Group column. The column names the group, links to it, and says whose loan it is: Loan to the group or Member's own loan. Use the All groups menu to look at one group; the group's own Loans tab is this same screen already filtered to it. The tabs are:

• All Group Loans, Members' Loans and Loans to Groups — the loans being repaid, all of them or one kind.
• Drafts — group loan drafts, drafts in review and rejected ones, in the same grid as Loan Drafts.
• Closed / Written Off.

The same loans also appear elsewhere, tagged with their group:

• Loans and Loan Drafts each have a Group Loans tab with the Group column. These loans stay in the other tabs too, so the status counts still add up.
• A member's Loans tab on their borrower page also lists the loans made to their group, marked in the Group column.
• A loan's statement can show the group's name (tick or untick Group in the statement's details options).

Collecting repayments at the meeting

Collect repayments (or START COLLECTION on today's meetings, or the Meetings tab → COLLECT REPAYMENTS) opens the group's collection sheet:

1. Set the meeting date, the account the cash was paid into, who received it, and the cash counted.
2. Tick who is present.
3. For each loan, the sheet shows what is overdue, what falls due that day and what was already paid that day. The amount received starts at what is left to collect; change it, say who paid (it can be another member), and add a note. A loan with nothing due still has a row, so a member can pay ahead. For a loan to the whole group you can note who brought what (Split by member).
4. The payments must add up to the cash counted. If they do not, an administrator or branch manager can post it anyway by giving a reason, which is kept on the meeting.
5. POST MEETING records every payment.

The payments are ordinary payments: they appear on each loan, count toward the reports, credit the chosen account, and a loan paid to zero closes automatically. A meeting is posted safely — each payment has a fixed reference, so if the connection fails part-way, the meeting is left unfinished, and posting again writes only the payments not yet recorded. Open the meeting from Meeting history and press FINISH POSTING.

A meeting can be dated up to today, not in the future. One meeting is kept per group per day; once it is posted, a missed payment is recorded from the loan's own page.

Each posted payment has the usual receipt (Receipt on the meeting page), and the PDF / CSV buttons give a summary of the meeting.

Ending a group

On the group's Details tab:

• Dissolve group — keeps the group's history. It is refused while the group has any open loan or draft. The members are taken out of it, and the group's borrowing record becomes inactive. If it was interrupted, Finish dissolving completes it. Group-only members left behind cannot borrow until they are changed to individual (an administrator or branch manager can do this in the same step) or they join another group.
• Delete group — only for a group made by mistake: no members and no loans. Anything else should be dissolved.

Reports

All three are under Groups → Reports and use the same dates and branch filters as the other reports. A loan officer sees only the groups assigned to them.

• Group performance — for each group: members, loans, outstanding, arrears, PAR 30, collection rate for the period and the attendance of its latest meeting.
• Group collection sheet — what each group should pay on a day, ready to print for the meeting, with blank Amount and Signature columns. Groups meeting that day come first.
• Exposure by group — how much of the portfolio sits with each group, with its loans one click away.

Who can do what

Using the AI assistant with groups

The assistant can look up a group by name or number, summarise how it is doing, and create or edit a group's name, number, meeting day and place, limit, joint liability and contact. It cannot set a group's status, leaders, members or loan officer — those are changed on the group's page, where the checks are.